ZG #6 – No Fathers, No Future: Exposing the Collapse (Part 3/12)

What happens when fathers disappear? The ripple effect doesn’t just hit the household — it fractures society, destabilises youth, and rewrites the future of Australia.

In this hard-hitting episode of The Finance Bible, Zeke Guenthroth breaks down:

• 📉 How fatherless homes have doubled in Australia since the 1980s
• 🇺🇸 Why 1 in 3 American children grow up without a dad
• 🔗 The direct link between broken homes and youth crime (70% of youth in custody come from single-parent families)
• 👶 Australia's birth rate crash to 1.5 children per woman — and how it's tied to relationship breakdown, economic pressure, and cultural shifts

But we’re not just pointing fingers — we’re offering solutions that actually work:

• 🧠 Premarital counselling: Cuts divorce risk from 24% to 11%
• 🇸🇪 Scandinavia’s joint custody model: Reduces youth delinquency by 20%
• 💬 Communication, policy reform, and community-led support that rebuilds strong families from the ground up

This episode fuses real stats with real stories — a wake-up call for anyone who wants to protect the next generation.

Whether you're a parent, policymaker, educator, or investor in Australia's future… this is a message you can’t ignore.

🎧 Enjoyed this episode?
Follow us on Instagram @zekeguenthrothofficial @oscardonproperty and @assetroad for daily insights, property breakdowns, and behind-the-scenes updates.
Explore more at www.assetroad.com.au

Disclaimer:
The information provided in this podcast is general in nature and does not constitute personal financial advice. It has been prepared without taking into account your objectives, financial situation or needs. Before acting on any information, you should consider the appropriateness of the advice, having regard to your own objectives, financial situation and needs. Asset Road Pty Ltd recommends you seek independent financial, legal, taxation or other advice as required. All investments carry risk. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Chapters

• 0:00 Crisis of Fatherless Homes
• 6:04 Fatherless Statistics by Country
• 12:01 The Link to Youth Crime
• 15:01 Australia's Crashing Birth Rates
• 19:38 Why Relationships Fail
• 26:30 Strategies for Stronger Families
• 31:32 Moving Forward and Solutions
• 33:20 Debate Points for Discussion

Transcript

Zeke Guenthroth: 0:00

Picture a young boy in Sydney growing up without his father's guidance, struggling to find his place in the world. By 15, he's caught up in petty crime, searching for belonging in all the wrong places. It's not just one story. It's a pattern that's repeated across Australia, us and beyond. Today, we're diving deep into the crisis of fatherless homes, how it's linked to youth crime and how Australia's declining birth rates tie into this complex issue. We'll explore why families are breaking apart, what's driving these trends and how we can build stronger futures for our kids. We'll trace trends from the 1980s through to now, backed by hard-hitting data, expert insights and real-world stories, from Australia's rising single-parent households to Scandinavia's unique approach to co-parenting. We'll uncover why this matters and what we can do about it. Plus, we'll highlight Australia's falling birth rates and their broader implications.

Zeke Guenthroth: 1:00

Welcome back to another episode of the Finance Bible Podcast. You're joined with myself, zeke, and your co-host, oscar. But before we get into it, please note that nothing in this podcast should ever be considered as personal financial advice. But if that is what you are seeking, get in touch, let us know and we will hook you up with the correct professionals. Sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Let's get into it professionals.

Zeke Guenthroth: 1:28

Sit back, relax and enjoy the show. Let's get into it. Let's start off by unpacking how widespread fatherless homes have become, not just in Australia, but globally, worldwide, internationally. What do the numbers show us from the 1980s through to now, and which countries are bucking the trend? So from the 80s to 2025, 45 years. So from the 80s to 2025, 45 years, father's homes, often single mother homes, have increased in many countries since the 1980s through to now, driven by rising divorce rates, cohabitation and changing social norms.

Zeke Guenthroth: 2:01

We'll go through a detailed breakdown, country by country. We're going to use Australia as a baseline, country by country. We're going to use Australia as a baseline. So going back to early 1981, we're just going to go through a couple of different countries that we got stats on and sort of look at where they're heading now. So Australia 15.5% were single parent families with dependent children.

Zeke Guenthroth: 2:20

In America, it was 12%, Fast forward to 1991, so 10 years. Children In America it was 12%, fast forward to 1991, so 10 years. Australia goes up to 16.6, not a huge jump 1%. The US, on the other hand, went up to 20, so 8% increase. 2001, just after I was born, we had 22% and I'm rounding up here, but 21.8%, 22%, 22 percent and america went up to 27 percent. 2011. America held strong and we went up to 22.4 percent. Sweden comes in at 31.3 percent. Poland was only nine percent. So pretty good stats there for poland, australia, us and sweden doing quite poor Fast forward through to 2021 and through now, even doing the best we can.

Zeke Guenthroth: 3:07

You had 21.8% were single parent homes in Australia. 80% were mother-led, meaning father wasn't in the picture. For 80% of those US, very similar, but 31% it's about a third in today's world. 33% of homes in America Fatherless, 34% in Sweden quite a poor statistic, if you ask me. Of them, 36% are single-father households. So you get 66% mother-led.

Zeke Guenthroth: 3:36

The UAE, now, this is a good one, and Poland, again another good one. Uae, like United Arab Emirates, less than 10% and Poland about 9%. So both of them sitting below 10% or a third of what ours are. Now, if we look into the stats there, we've got to figure out what's going on. What's changed in Australia, we've gone up quite drastically. We've more than doubled. We've got to think about what's going on there. As a country, we've virtually doubled our fatherless homes in that period, because there's obviously more now than there was then, although it's only about a 10% to 12% increase. The number of people has increased quite drastically.

Zeke Guenthroth: 4:17

So if we then go on to look at what's actually happening the divorce rate it peaked so after 1975 Family Law law act, which introduced a no-fault divorce basically you can get divorced because why not? That had an increase in divorces, meaning an increase in single households, and it went up to 4.6 per thousand and stabilized at 2.2 per thousand. So it's actually halved since then. It's's gotten better. However, we're marrying less than we were. We now delay how often we get married and how old we are when we get married has gone drastically from sitting at like 19, 20, all the way through to about 25, 26. So it's getting later and later. We're buying houses and so on.

Zeke Guenthroth: 4:58

If we go into US, 18.4 million children were in fatherless households by 2021. 18.4 million children were in fatherless households by 2021. 18.4 million In 2025, fast forward. Today there is more recent statistics on it. It is more than the Australian population is now in a fatherless home. Sweden 34% of households. We've already been through that. Poland, only 9%. We've already talked about that as well.

Zeke Guenthroth: 5:21

But what are the notable shifts? What has occurred? What are the trends? What's changed? As I just said, the no-fault divorce laws. That's huge. That happened in australia and us 1975 and 1970, so that had a massive repercussion.

Zeke Guenthroth: 5:36

1990 through 2000, cohabitation became much more common, especially in like scandinavia and austral. So ultimately what that did was it decoupled marriage from parenthood. So it used to be more traditional and you would say get married, wait to have the kids and then have children. However, now it's the opposite. It's moving together, have kids, get married and buy a house or whatever it is. And then in 2010, it's through to now, the divorce rate has stabilized, but the single-parent households continue to rise because you've got non-marital births and separations prior to marriage. So ultimately it's just people are not getting married now, so the divorce rate doesn't show it, but the actual number of houses going up there single-parent are increasing.

Zeke Guenthroth: 6:23

Here's a jaw-dropper In the US, 31% of kids, which is over 18 million, live without a father at home. That's a population bigger than most countries. And in Australia the number of single-parent families has doubled since the 1980s Virtually doubled. This is a global issue we can't ignore. The rise in single-parent households reflects broader societal shifts, but it comes with challenges that we must address. That's a direct quote from the Australian Institute of Family Studies.

Zeke Guenthroth: 6:51

Now that we've seen the scale of the fatherless home epidemic, let's look at the consequences. So one of the most alarming is the rise in youth crime, and the data is clear about the link. It's so obvious, and probably the biggest issue in today's society, in my opinion, that it's the biggest indicator of crime. It's the biggest indicator of anything going wrong in a society and it's just shocking. We need to do something about it. Every country needs something about it. I'm not sure why they haven't. Poland uae lead the charge. We'll follow you and we'll get we'll get to more about why those two specifically have really low rates on it.

Zeke Guenthroth: 7:26

But there's a well, well distinguished link between fatherless homes and youth crime. It's well documented through outcomes and, although different countries vary and social and policy differences vary, it's just an obvious statistic. In America, 70% of youth in custody did not grow up with both parents. Children from single-parent homes are two to three times more likely to engage in high-risk behaviors like drugs and all that kind of thing. In Sweden they have lower youth crime rates, even though they've still got 34% of single-parent households. I think we can put that due to joint custody, whereas here it's not as common to have joint custody. They've got about 40% of divorced couples have joint custody, which reduces delinquency they reckon that's by about 20%. And then Poland and UAE juvenile delinquency is less than 5% and less than 3%. Can that be a direct correlation with their low single-parent homes? Absolutely it can.

Zeke Guenthroth: 8:21

In single-parent families, poverty and crowded dwellings explain 56% of variation in juvenile crime across postcodes in Australia and Indigenous youth, often from disrupted family structures, extremely high in assault cases In America. A more recent study and we're talking Pennsylvania 2021, shows that 80% of juvenile court cases involve youth from broken homes, about 50% of which were living with single mothers. In Pennsylvania, over 80% of juvenile court cases involve kids from broken homes and nearly half live with single mothers. It's not just a local issue. It's a signal that family structure matters for our youth. But why the link? There's economic stress, there's lack of role models, there's emotional impact, there's cultural factors let's go through them all. So single-parent homes, often motherland, face higher poverty rates than two-parent homes. So we're talking about an 11% to 12% increase and that creates an unstable environment. And that creates an unstable environment.

Zeke Guenthroth: 9:23

Obviously, if you've got two parents, generally speaking, both are going to be working and or one will work full-time, one will work casual, whatever it is, but it's dual income. One will be working, one will be raising a kid. If you've just got the single parent, they're hard done by. It's harder for them to then support the family, do the work and then come home and still parent a child. It's very difficult.

Zeke Guenthroth: 9:47

I'm just going to use an example of a single mother. How will a single mother go to work, work her ass off, do the best that she can come home to three children after a big day at work trying to support her family, cook dinner, get it all done, figure out what they learned at school, parent each child, you know, keep them all in check. And then, if they're boisterous and they're teenagers and the young boys coming up and they're starting to play up, how does she discipline them? How does she prevent that from occurring? When she's out working all the time she's got to get sleep for the next day and at the end of the day there's no father figure to come in and be that firm line in the sand for these boys and say, hey, hey, fellas, listen up. You can't do that. There will be consequences, stop. So there's the economic impact there and there's the actual time impact as well of trying to figure out how you can parent multiple children at the same time while you're trying to earn an income.

Zeke Guenthroth: 10:39

Lack of role models, so simple Fathers provide disciplining guidance. Their absence on its own increases delinquency risk astronomically. If you rewind back in the day, to me as a child, okay, if I was playing up, mum would come in and tell me to stop. Okay, I was a bit of a bad kid at times. I wouldn't say bad kid, I liked to play up and ultimately, if mum was going to tell me to stop, it's like okay, what are you going to do? Send me to my room, cool. But if she said don't make me call your dad or wait till your dad gets home, it was like, oh crap, like dad can actually do something about it. You know what I mean.

Zeke Guenthroth: 11:19

At the end of the day, boys, ultimately I'm not advocating for hitting your child or anything, but at the end of the day, sometimes boys do need to be disciplined growing up because without that father figure to sort of set it in stone and say, hey, look, there is consequences, I don't want to have to smack you or whatever, then, growing up as a boy, you're a boy, you're not going to talk to your mum about certain things, you're going to talk to your dad about it If your dad's not there. And then you go to school and there's no male teachers, or 17% of male teachers how do you manage that as a young boy and try to figure out how you want to talk about that and who you can talk about it with? It's just such a difficult scenario and you really are going to feel left out and alone. And then if we go the other way to you know it's a single father household, then you know the daughter might have trouble talking about it with her dad and stuff, but at least she goes to school and 80% of the teachers are women. You know so at that age, sort of guides and things in place to help the girls grow and where they can have those like safe space chats and that kind of thing, whereas as a male it's a bit like oh what you know, then you've got the emotional impact as well.

Zeke Guenthroth: 12:36

So children of divorce they report drastic trust and attachment issues, which leads to social struggles and risky behaviors growing up, as you can imagine, like if your, if your dad walks out on you as a young kid or your mom walks out on you as a young kid, then you're going to have those trust issues, you're going to have attachment issues and socially you will struggle. You may engage in risky behavior. You know you might. You might develop those, those mental sort of guidelines for yourself to prevent you getting hurt again. You might not get that trust in your friends and develop that association where you could risk getting hurt by them. Then you've got cultural factors as well.

Zeke Guenthroth: 13:15

So collectivist cultures like UAE, poland. They leverage extended family support to mitigate father absence effects. So because they're such a tiny community and their religion comes into that as well, if there is a fatherless home the 9% of the homes that are single parent then there's an uncle, there's a brother, there's a something there where they can come in and get that into it and get them involved because they're such a closer family. So summing that up, father absence is basically the biggest key driver of youth crime. But social support systems can make a difference. And what sort of social support system are we talking about? We're talking about other families. We're talking about friends. We're talking about just getting a sense of community back, which we don't really have anymore. We don't have that Like you can get your boy in sports or whatever.

Zeke Guenthroth: 14:03

That's going to help drastically, but then, as a single mum, again, I don but her in that position. Let's just say you've got Susie, she's a single mum, she's 45, she's got four children. You know Ben, bob Dylan and Zach all boys and all four of them want to play sport. Two of them want to play soccer, two of them want to play league, and she goes out. She's trying to feed a family of four on her own, pay the mortgage, look after them, get them through school. At that point, two of them are in high school, two of them are in primary school. So how does she, susie, get those children to school, get to work, pay the mortgage, put food on the table, take these two to soccer, take these two to footy, all in one day? It's not happening. It's just not possible. So it's really difficult.

Zeke Guenthroth: 15:00

If we move on, though, and let's talk more about other chronic birth rates, because it's not just crime and family breakdown that we need to talk about. Australia is also facing a huge population problem. Birth rates are crashing. They're crashing hard. It's directly tied to the shift in how families are formed. It's directly tied to fatherless homes. It's directly tied to splitting, it's directly tied to divorce and it's shocking.

Zeke Guenthroth: 15:18

Without immigration we are going negative trajectory for our population and it's not pretty. So our fertility rate in Australia has significantly declined. Family structures, societal demographics, it's all on the change, it's all on the downhill. So we go back to the 60s, we're having about 22.8 births per thousand, and if you go back to 1961, the fertility rate was 3.55. So it's basically 3.5 children per female.

Zeke Guenthroth: 15:49

1981, 1.94. 2001, 1.73. So we've got a half now, from 60 to 2,000. And then 2023, 1.5. So it's more than halved. It's gone way down. It's shooting down. It's going down quick. It's well below the replacement level. Our replacement level is 2.1. So if we're in at 1.5, we're just not getting anywhere close to how many children we need created per year to sustain our population.

Zeke Guenthroth: 16:20

So our population, instead of just sustaining or instead of going up a bit without immigration, it's just going down. It's like a plane crash. And I mean there's been changes along the way, like during covid. We had a brief spike where it went to 1.7, which still nowhere near enough. Had a brief spike where it went to 1.7, which still nowhere near enough, by the way, and then back down to 1.5 2023. But was that due to lockdown? You know you're sort of stuck in an area with your partner. You know you can't go anywhere, I think. So it's the only sort of thing that changed between now and then that could have caused it.

Zeke Guenthroth: 16:52

And what is actually contributing to this overall decrease in fertility rate? Like, there's a lot of different things, but later marriages. So the median age now for first-time mothers is actually 30. It used to be back in like what? 2010, that we're sitting at about 28. It's now 30. And that's been getting pushed later and later and later and later. It just keeps getting pushed down the line and we're getting to a position where they don't want children until they've got themselves in a position to have affordability. They want to travel, they want to have fun, they want to do all these things and then come back and have the child when they're 30, and then that's also.

Zeke Guenthroth: 17:33

I don't think it can get much worse than that, because obviously there is a ticking time bomb for birthing. Your age and your body clock does actually let you. Your biological age ultimately prevents you from having children at 50. You've also got fatherless home figure. You've got the lack in marriage. You've got the decrease in family staying together, you've got the increase in cost of everything, and we'll end up circling all of this back in a final podcast where we talk about where Australia is heading and we talk about the likes of. You know our house and price. We're in the top five most expensive countries in the world for income-to-debt ratio or income-to-property-price ratio and that kind of thing. It's only getting worse. It's only going to get worse. We're going to be about 320,000 houses short of reaching our goal in 2029 if we keep immigration where it's heading.

Zeke Guenthroth: 18:20

So there's so many different issues that come into effect with everything and they're all linked, they're all correlated. But declining birth rates align with smaller family sizes and increased single-parent households. So fewer couples marry, fewer people have children. People have children later and then if you're divorcing and not marrying, then you're going to have less children in total as well. If you're a family that's stayed together for 40 years, you're probably going to have more than one child. And then there's changing gender roles too, which we're all very well aware of. So you know it discourages stable partnerships and contributes to family breakdowns as well. So norway, for example, or just scandinavia in general, general they're very advanced with gender roles and that kind of thing, and they also have a terrible rate for single family parent, single parent families. So australia's fertility rate is now just 1.5, way below what's needed to sustain our population of 2.1.

Zeke Guenthroth: 19:17

Fewer kids, more single-parent homes it's reshaping our society in ways we can't ignore. Crime rates are up, youth crime's up, youth suicide's up. The leading killer of men under 45 is suicide. Far-lost homes are just killing everything. Falling birth rates reflect changing priorities, but they also signal challenges for family stability.

Zeke Guenthroth: 19:35

Let's zoom in on the breakdown itself. Why are relationships failing? Who's walking away more often and why? The answers aren't what you'd expect. So divorce rates vary globally, influenced by cultural, economic and legal factors. I've actually got a piece of paper here to guide me through this one, because I had to write down the actual statistics for it, but let's find that Bingo. So divorce rate per thousand 2021.

Zeke Guenthroth: 20:03

Australia 2.2. Us 2.5. Sweden 2.5. Denmark 2.7. Finland 2.4. Uae 1.5. And Poland 1.3.

Zeke Guenthroth: 20:13

So so the drivers of this you've got in australia, no fault, divorce and relational issues. Us, you've got infidelity, so cheating, financial stress. Sweden, gender equality, social acceptance, denmark divorce is so easy over there and there's a lot of welfare support as well. So it's like I don't want to say an incentive, but it makes it easier. Finland there's high cohabitation and the gender equality is like way up there. Uae they're more cultural and religious. They've got a real emphasis on family and behaviour and bonding. And Poland, which is the lowest. Their Catholic values values are up there and they have low cohabitation.

Zeke Guenthroth: 20:58

So it's not very frequent for a man and a woman to be living together and cohabitate if they're not together. The highest divorce rates in the world are the Maldives, which is 5.2, and Belarus, which is 3.7. So we can move on from that start there. Second marriages in the us sixty sixty seven percent of second marriages fail and seventy percent plus fail for the third. So if you come out of one marriage in in America and enter a second, you've got a two out of three chance failing. And then if you get the third, you've got a two out of three chance of failing, and then if you get in the third, you've got a 70% chance of failing. So that's an interesting stat If we're talking about why people leave the relationships.

Zeke Guenthroth: 21:42

Why do partners leave? So why men leave. Infidelity is actually the biggest one for men leaving a relationship in America. So 58% of the US, divorces decided by men are for infidelity, economic pressure, so men in working class jobs. They face instability which reduces their marriage ability. So, for example, if you're going to be working heaps hard and you've got instability in your job, then it makes it hard for a partner to sit down and marry you and stay with you. You've got cultural shifts as well, so reduce stigma around a force and cohabitation acceptance. So actually more than half the population over there has cohabited between 18 and 44. And then you've got unrealistic expectations as well. So not only are the, not only is divorce no longer like frowned upon, it's more accepted, like I probably argue. I can't argue it's more common than not because it's 45 but it's about equally as common now.

Zeke Guenthroth: 22:46

But unrealistic expectations are ridiculous. So a lot of people just leave because they seek a better match. Interesting Interesting why women leave. You have financial independence, so the women's workforce participation, which was about 75% 80% at the moment. I believe that reduces dependence on marriage. So women used to have to get married to basically support themselves and they would be dependent on the husband working back in the day. And that's clearly changed because they're all in the work, majority are in the workforce now. You know they're all getting paid equally for the same amount of work. There's a lot of regulation in place to ensure that they're safe. There's a lot of jobs now that are women only and they advertise for women only to help get them in the workforce or in different roles and stuff like that. So their financial independence is growing. You've got unequal partnerships as well.

Zeke Guenthroth: 23:42

So there's a 97% high divorce risk when mothers work but husbands contribute minimally to housework and childcare. So if the husband isn't actually, you know, helping with the housework or the childcare, it drastically increases pretty much guarantees that there's going to be a divorce. And then one of the worst reasons is domestic violence. So unfortunately, one in six Australian women do still experience partner violence, which is a key driver of separation. So that's actually one of the biggest reasons that splitting occurs in Australia, which probably goes back to fatherless homes, really Like if you're a man and you're beating a woman, you're a scoundrel or scumbag even, and does that come back to the same thing as a youth crime? We don't know. There's probably statistics on it In fact, I reckon I'll find them by the end of this but there would be some kind of indicator. Anyway, either way, not acceptable. Shouldn't be done.

Zeke Guenthroth: 24:39

Cultural and religious influences as well. So Poland and UAE Catholic and Islamic. Their values emphasize family unity way more than anything here. Like our family unity in Australia shocking Poland and UAE, mainly due to the actual religion there lowers divorce rates drastically. Individualism in Australia and US it increases divorce acceptance drastically. If you actually look at the statistic in America and Australia between religious marriages and not religious marriages, the numbers far outweigh. How do I word this? If you're married and it's a religious marriage and there's a religion in the background, your marriage has more than a 50% chance of success. If you don't, and it's nothing to do with religion, you automatically have a less than 50% chance of success.

Zeke Guenthroth: 25:33

And in Scandinavia, welfare, state support and gender equality normalize divorce. So it's pretty much you will get income from the government and divorce is all good, it's fine, and then they have really good joint custody. So it does mitigate the child impact a bit, but the fatherless homes are still up there. So imagine, imagine a single mum in melbourne juggling two jobs while her teenager actually starts skipping school. Right, she's influenced by the wrong crowd, she starts doing some drugs or whatever. It's a ripple effect of a father's absence, a story too common in Australia. Today, 21.8% of Aussie kids are in single-parent homes, making this story come true.

Zeke Guenthroth: 26:12

Relationships fail when expectations of mutual support and respect aren't met. Now that we've ultimately exposed the problem, or parts of the problem, there's way more to it. But if we sat here and talked about them, we'd be sitting here for hours and hours on end, which I'm sure you guys don't want to listen to. So let's talk solutions. How do we fix what's broken? Starting with better marriages, better families, fewer kids falling through the cracks and so on. So strategies for lasting marriages, premarital counselling I personally don't know if I would do this because I'm not super into counselling myself, but that's okay. Couples who discuss expectations reduce divorce rates from 24% to 11% in the first couple of years, like early on. Realistically, if you don't have the conversations with your partner, you can have counselling in there to help if you need. But if you don't discuss expectations, you don't talk about what you want, you don't talk about what you need, you don't discuss helping out with childcare and house duties and stuff like that or how you're going to budget together and stuff. Your chance of failing goes up 13. Clear communication, again, as mentioned above, addressing financial, emotional and role expectations lowers the breakup risk. Pretty much the exact same thing I just said, but more focusing on emotional and financial communication. So you can do it all with counseling, but you don't need to if you can actually do it. Religious involvement so, but you don't need to if you can actually do it. Religious involvement so regular religious service attendance reduces divorce risk by 14%. Just go to church once a week 14% reduced, crazy stat.

Zeke Guenthroth: 27:51

And the next one is avoid premarital cohabitation, which really shocks me. Cohabitation which really shocks me because I've always thought and I think it's more common than not in today's world that you would cohabit or cohabitate before engagement. Right, you'd move in with your partner, see how it goes, feel it out, make sure that they're clean, they're tidy, they understand personal space, all of that kind of thing. Get it all figured out. But no, couples who cohabitate before engagement are actually 40% more likely to divorce. So, statistically, if you're actually waiting, put a ring on it and then cohabitate A shocking statistic to me, but that's an interesting one.

Zeke Guenthroth: 28:37

Next is reducing youth crime. So joint parenthood Scandinavian models show 30% to 40% shared custody reduces youth delinquency by 20%. If we model joint custody as opposed to single parent custody in Australia, it would make a huge difference. I think our 20%, them having 20%, I think ours would actually increase from that because joint parenthood here you'd be forced to sort of get along with different genders. The father would have to be more involved in school, the mum would have to be more involved with things, they would have to talk on some level, I would assume, to make sure that the kid is getting the best upbringing they can. If you've got two people looking out for a kid, it's going to end up better than one. Community support collectivist cultures.

Zeke Guenthroth: 29:18

So UAE, poland they leverage extended family to stabilize children post-divorce. We already spoke about that. So if you do get a divorce, leverage your family, get people to help out If you do end up in a single custody situation. Reach out to your brothers, reach out to your uncles, reach out to your friends, whoever it is. Get some others. Reach out to your uncles, reach out to your friends, whoever it is. Get some. Get some role models in there, okay, and intervention programs. This is a common sense one. So if you get like coping focused programs for children this is like post-divorce, their mental health and risky behavior chances decrease drastically. So some form of counseling, some form of counselling, some form of engagement with a professional, an intervention program, will make a difference.

Zeke Guenthroth: 30:03

Ultimately, if we're talking about strategies that are separate to that, like we're talking actual policy strategies, I think you need to restrengthen the marriage laws. You need to reconsider no-fault divorce impacts, marriage laws. You need to reconsider no-fault divorce impacts, as it spiked the rates. It just came out of nowhere and bang, bang, bang, everyone's getting divorced. We need to actually support fathers. So I think and it's supporting mothers too, it's encouraging them, but you want to encourage paternal involvement is mainly what I'm talking about. You can give tax incentives or custody reforms or whatever it is. Probably custody reforms would be the best one, especially in Australia because our custody system is quite poor. But if you had custody reforms where you involved the man more and or tax incentives for the man to be involved, post a split, because a lot of the time they just throw their hands up and go, yep, well, if I don't get custody, I'm not involved, I don't care, then, yeah, you can get them involved easier with these kind of reforms, with them being involved.

Zeke Guenthroth: 31:00

Everything we spoke about decreases. Then family education. So we need to fund community programs teaching relationship skills. If we don't do that, then it's just not going to. Nothing's going to improve. It's pointless. If we want safer streets, we need stronger families. Easy divorce laws might feel liberating, but the cost to our kids is way too high. It's time to prioritize family stability again. Strong families, safer communities Simple Investing in family stability is investing in our children's future. And now that we've covered the trends, the pain, the patterns, it's time to act. So here's how we move forward with clarity, strength and urgency.

Zeke Guenthroth: 31:36

Right so fatherless homes. They've risen globally, with Australia and the US seeing significant increases since the 80s. We've already gone through that and linked to high youth crime rates, scandinavia's joint custody model and the UAE and Poland cultural values. They offer lessons for stability. We can learn from that. If we know that this country is doing way better than us one-third less than the US, one-third less than this country is doing way better than us One third less than the US, one third less than one third of sorry, the US, one third of Denmark why are we not learning from them? Why don't we take some of their values and input them here? With that and with everything else that we've discussed, our declining birth rates could increase again. They could get back up. We could get to a position where we can repopulate naturally and we wouldn't rely on immigration as much. Again, it decreases crime, decreases home values. It doesn't decrease home values. It reduces the pressure on home values and rent prices and makes a huge difference.

Zeke Guenthroth: 32:29

So, individuals you need to seek premarital counselling and prioritise open communication. Policymakers they need to implement policies supporting two-parent households and paternal involvement. They need to get the men back involved in the relationships and communities need to actually build support networks for single parents and youth that are at risk. So anyone from a single parent household. The family is a nucleus of a civilization. Strengthen it, secure our future. Australia's birth rate is at a historic low of 1.5, and one in five kids grow up without a father. This is a crisis for our future. Share this message to demand policies that support strong families.

Zeke Guenthroth: 33:08

I'm going to leave you with a couple of things to think about before we go today. So debate points for discussion, right. Debate them at your home, Debate them while you listen to the podcast. Go home to your partner and talk about them. I've got a couple of them. There's five in total.

Zeke Guenthroth: 33:21

So should no-fault divorce laws be reformed to prioritise family stability? Given their role in spiking divorce rates, does premarital cohabitation, now common in 81% of Australian couples, undermine long-term marriage success? We know the statistic. How can government support single parents while incentivising two-parent households without stigmatising lone parents, because that's a problem as well. You don't want to start incentivising too much and supporting it too much and then being like oh, lone parents are no good. Cultural and religious values are seen in Poland and the UAE, viable solutions for nations like Australia. We don't have a huge religion basis. Is it something we can incorporate somehow?

Zeke Guenthroth: 34:07

And can Scandinavians' joint custody model work in high-conflict divorce scenarios common in Australia and the US, like infidelity, leaving Judah, domestic violence and stuff like that? What actually, or how, do we do it in a fair way? So, obviously, the scenario is where, yes, we absolutely need it. But then, in scenarios like domestic violence, how do we actually protect a kid and protect a mother from that occurring while having joint custody? Is it possible? How do you then, as a policymaker, define the two and determine the difference? Is it a case-by-case scenario? How do we do it?

Zeke Guenthroth: 34:42

I'll leave that with you and before we go, I wasn't able to find a statistic on the actual percentage of domestic abusers or domestic violence people and how many of them came from fatherless homes. However, I was able to find 70 percent of juveniles in prison come from single-parent homes, which, which we already knew, normally with the father of absence, but an interesting stat that I found was that single mothers are actually most likely to perpetrate abuse towards children compared to those in two-parent households, especially under significant economic strain. So just a random stat that I thought would throw out there to finalize the podcast, but there's going to be a lot of discussion about this. I'm sure I'm going to get a lot of DMs about the whole podcast. Again, we're going through a series of things. I'm putting issues out there.

Zeke Guenthroth: 35:29

Eventually we're going to come to an episode at the end of the series where I'm going to go through each different thing and what sort of things I would change in the world if I could. Obviously I'm not a magic man, I can't do it. So, yeah, it's just a bit of interesting things to think about, a little bit of conversation to have and, who knows, if enough of you listen and enough of you can you know, process what is being said and think about the changes that can be made, then maybe that will make a difference. Who knows? But I'll catch you next time. Ciao, that will make a difference, who knows? But I'll catch you next time. Ciao, darling. As always, we hope you enjoyed the episode and if you did, you know exactly what needs to be done.

Zeke Guenthroth: 36:05

Hit that follow button, subscribe, share it to friends, family or even your co-workers, as sharing this podcast helps not just us, but everyone in the world to learn about more finances. Thank you, darling.